Blame the killers, not the weapons

By S.E. Cupp

|NEW YORK DAILY NEWS|

Dec 19, 2012 | 4:14 AM

A Bushmaster XM15 .223 caliber rifle. (HO/REUTERS)

On Sept. 11, 2001, I joined hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who were evacuated from their office buildings to walk home to safety. During that walk, I paused to watch in horror as the twin towers crumbled to the ground.

As they fell, a man next to me ran wildly up to a cab driver, who appeared to be Muslim. He stuck his finger into the cab's open window and screamed, "You did this! You did this!"

It was a disgusting act of rage that blamed a whole category of people for the acts of a few. It was one man's desperate way of making sense of an atrocity.

In the hours following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, there were similar reactions. Blind hatred and wild accusations — death threats, even — were directed at gun rights advocates. The anger was understandable, the behavior maybe forgivable, but just as with the cab driver, the response was wrong.

No one but Adam Lanza is to blame for Friday's bloodshed. But after tragedies like Newtown, the knee-jerk reaction to blame guns always takes center stage.

If guns truly are the problem, then the only intellectually honest position to take is that all of them need to be eliminated.

Focusing, as many have, only on assault weapons is a copout. For one, a mere 2.8% of homicides were committed with a rifle in 2010, while 42.6% were committed with a handgun. And during the 10-year federal ban on assault weapons, numerous mass shootings — including Columbine — took place.

Making it harder to obtain a gun is also skirting the issue. As we now know, Lanza stole his guns from his mother, who apparently legally purchased and owned them.

But deep down, even the most strident gun control advocates know that banning all guns isn't a rational proposition, and not just because it's unconstitutional or politically impossible. Rather, it simply wouldn't work.

Prohibition hasn't proven to be useful in eliminating, well, much of anything, including illicit drugs and, yes, illegal weapons. There are mass shootings even in countries with the strictest of gun laws (Norway, for one). And someone intent on killing doesn't necessarily need a gun to do it, as Timothy McVeigh reminds.

So if we know that eliminating all guns is untenable, while less extreme measures just haven't worked, then what practical solutions are gun control advocates actually bringing to the table when they say they want to have a "real conversation" about guns? Not many, I suspect.

If we want to have a real conversation, it has to start with the broken mental health system that's failing our young people. We have to talk about teen suicide, depression and bullying.

We have to talk about the overmedication of our children, bad parenting and a lack of access to health care.

Advertisement

Those are real conversations. The rest is unserious, misguided anger that blames the wrong group for this crime. And I am confident that it will not prevent another mass killing.

"Surely, we can do better than this," President Obama said from Newtown this weekend. "We will have to change."

He's right. We owe it to the families of Newtown, Aurora and every other community ripped apart at the seams by a mass murderer to change the way we talk about this issue.